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This article introduces a 6P framework for understanding intelligence, as well as the theories and tests that are derived from it. The 6Ps in the framework are purpose, press, problems, persons, processes, and products underlying intelligence. Each of the 6Ps is considered in turn. We argue that although the purpose of intelligence is culturally universal, the other Ps can vary at least somewhat over time and space. A single theory or test of intelligence represents a particular configuration of the 6Ps, but other configurations of the 6Ps might yield different theories and different tests.

Cultural intelligence is one's ability to adapt when confronted with problems arising in interactions with people or artifacts of diverse cultures. In this study, we conduct an initial construct-validation and assessment of a maximum-performance test of cultural intelligence. We assess the psychometric properties of the test and also correlate the test with other measures with which it might be expected there would be some connection. We found that our test was internally consistent and correlated significantly with maximum-performance tests of abilities but generally less or not at all with typical-performance tests, including cultural intelligence and openness to experience. However, our test appears to be distinct in what it measures from the other tests of cognitive abilities. The results lead us to suggest that cultural intelligence may have both maximum-performance and typical-performance aspects.

An investment perspective on creativity, proposed 30 years ago, no longer seems adequate, nor do various revisions of the model made since then. The world, or at least the way many people experience it, has changed and so have the challenges for creativity. In particular, creativity is being used to increasingly greater effect in negative ways and in ways that lack integrity with respect both to internal coherence and external correspondence to the world. To understand creativity and adequately teach it, people need to take into account its positivity and its integrity with respect to internal coherence and external correspondence.

Toxic giftedness is giftedness that is used for negative and even harmful ends. The field of giftedness has not been quick to recognize the importance to society of toxic giftedness, and its responsibility to combat it. This article defines the concept of toxic giftedness. Then it discusses two manifestations of toxic giftedness: gifted toxic leadership and gifted toxic followership. Toxic leaders and toxic followers are of different kinds. Some toxic leaders intend to do harm; others do so inadvertently. Toxic followers look out for their own interests at the expense of others' interests. They may be oblivious, ingratiators, loyalists, or True Believers. Educators of the gifted have a responsibility in current times to do more to combat toxic giftedness and to do whatever they can to ensure that giftedness is used in ways to make the world better, not worse.

This article describes a three-step process by which behaviors are associated with the concept of "giftedness." In the first step, a three-way interaction of a person x task x situation leads to some kind of excellence in a societally significant performance. In the second step, that performance is identified as excellent and societally significant. In the third step, the performance is labeled as "gifted" and the person who did the performance potentially as a "gifted person." Behavior may be excellent (Step 1) and societally significant but not recognized as such (Step 2). Or behavior may be recognized as excellent and even societally significant (Step 2), but not be labeled as "gifted" (Step 3). The article elaborates on this three-step process.

This article reviews the implications of many of the major schools in the history of psychology for understanding giftedness and its inner workings: operationist, psychometric, psychoanalytic, associationist, behaviorist, Gestalt, cognitive, humanistic/positive psychology, functionalist/pragmatic/constructivist, cultural, and biological. Each paradigm has elucidated different aspects of human nature and functioning, and each has somewhat different implications for how we can understand giftedness. No one paradigm can provide complete understanding of giftedness. Rather, the paradigms should be viewed as different windows toward understanding giftedness, all of which together tell us much more than any individual one. It is regrettable that so many theorists and practitioners have locked themselves into an operationist paradigm, which simply accepts current measurement operations as sufficient for identifying and developing giftedness. The operationist paradigm is wholly insufficient to meet the challenges of the world of the 21st century.

Two implicit metaphors can be seen as having dominated the study of the gifted--the savings bank and the investment bank. In the savings-bank metaphor, people have differential levels of IQ or general intelligence, which is viewed as determining whether they are gifted. Their cognitive ability is their metaphorical "money in the bank." In the investment-bank metaphor, people are seen as having differential investments in varied kinds of abilities and talents. Their pattern of abilities is their metaphorical portfolio of investments. A better implicit metaphor might be the foundation, however, whose effectiveness is judged by the worthiness of the transformational causes to which it contributes and the effectiveness of the use of the foundation's assets toward these causes. A person is gifted by virtue not merely of the assets they have but of how they transformationally deploy those assets.

Myside bias, a form of confirmation bias, is a major impediment to scientific thinking. It results in scientists, potential scientists, and consumers of science drawing conclusions that do not follow from data but rather that follow from prior scientific, ideological beliefs. Gifted people are at least as susceptible to these biases as are other people. We propose in this article a set of techniques for combating such bias. In particular, we suggest that gifted (and other) individuals seeking to draw scientific conclusions put themselves in the place of various individuals involved in scientific refereeing--in particular, of reviewers with varying prior predispositions (e.g., reviewers with different paradigmatic worldviews and reviewers who are picayune critics) and journal editors. Through these techniques, gifted individuals may spare themselves embarrassments that they might otherwise encounter, not despite, but even because of their own superior intellects.

In many nations, grades and standardized test scores are used to select students for programs of scientific study. We suggest that the skills that these assessments measure are related to success in science, but only peripherally in comparison with two other skills, scientific creativity and recognition of scientific impact. In three studies, we investigated the roles of scientific creativity and recognition of scientific impact on scientific thinking. The three studies described here together involved 219 students at a selective university in the Northeast U.S. Participants received assessments of scientific creativity and recognition of scientific impact as well as a variety of previously used assessments measuring scientific reasoning (generating alternative hypotheses, generating experiments, drawing conclusions) and the fluid aspect of general intelligence (letter sets, number series). They also provided scores from either or both of two college-admissions tests--the SAT and the ACT--as well as demographic information. Our goal was to determine whether the new tests of scientific impact and scientific creativity correlated and factored with the tests of scientific reasoning, fluid intelligence, both, or neither. We found that our new measures tapped into aspects of scientific reasoning as we previously have studied it, although the factorial composition of the test on recognition of scientific impact is less clear than that of the test of scientific creativity. We also found that participants rated high-impact studies as more scientifically rigorous and practically useful than low-impact studies, but also generally as less creative, probably because their titles/abstracts were seemingly less novel for our participants. Replicated findings across studies included the correlation of Letter Sets with Number Series (both measures of fluid intelligence) and the correlation of Scientific Creativity with Scientific Reasoning.

Existing theories and frameworks generally have regarded creativity as inhering in a person, a task, a situation, or a combination of 2 of these 3 elements. After reviewing these approaches, and frameworks that are based on the interaction of more than 2 components, we propose a Person × Task × Situation synergistic paradigm, according to which creativity is dynamic and can be fully understood only as an interaction of all 3 of the elements. Building on the strengths of existing frameworks, our P × T × S proposal highlights: (a) the need to include the other 2 elements as moderators, regardless of which element is the central or starting point of the analysis, (b) the idea that the extent to which each element influences the others and the degree of overlap among elements can vary, and (c) the dynamic aspect of creativity, associated with changes in different persons across the lifespan, for different creative tasks, and for different situations. In addition to contributing an integrative theoretical account, this framework has significant, pragmatic implications for both the assessment and the development of creativity. We end with a call for both researchers and practitioners who test for or teach for creativity to specify the range of persons, tasks, and situations to which their assessments or training generalize.

Gifts can be individually, dyadically, or collectively chosen and oriented. Society, in its identification of the gifted, has chosen to focus on individual and sometimes dyadic goods. This practice represents a culture of individualism, but it has become solipsistic. We argue that identification instead should focus on those most likely to help to achieve a collective common good--who will bestow on others, gifts that are broadly beneficial especially to those most in need of help.

The focus of the field of giftedness is on the wrong thing. Instead of focusing on identifying who is gifted, the field should identify how people will deploy their gifts and educate students to deploy their gifts in ways that will make the world a better place. In this article, I present at least a partial taxonomy of how gifts can be deployed and discuss how the taxonomy can be used to shift the emphasis in the field. In particular, I discuss nine types of giftedness: Type 1--unidentified; Type 2--inert (largely undeployed) giftedness; Type 3--fully transactional giftedness (where one gives something back in return for getting something); Type 4--self-transformational giftedness (where one transforms oneself but not others); Type 5--other-transformational giftedness (where one transforms others but not oneself); Type 6--full transformational giftedness (where one transforms both oneself and others); Type 7--self-destructive giftedness (where one's gifts are deployed self-destructively); Type 8--other-destructive giftedness (where one's gifts are deployed toward destroying others); and Type 9--full pseudo-transformational giftedness (where one's gifts are destructive of oneself and others).

This article introduces the construct of personal talent curation. "Personal talent curation" is one's assessment of one's talents--of one's strengths and weaknesses--but also the building of an adaptive match in life between those talents and both one's career pursuits and one's personal lifestyle. Sometimes, this match means pursuing a lifelong passion, but other times, it means giving up that passion or transforming it into a passion that works in the broader context of the life one seeks for oneself. For example, one may be an exceptionally talented musician, scientist, or artist, but the concomitants of a life building relentlessly on those talents--competition, professional jealousy, and continual critiques--just do not fit the kind of life one wishes to lead. In such cases, it may turn out that what in a profession or in society is viewed as a "failure" or a "derailment" may represent a personal adaptive success.

Intelligence typically is defined as consisting of "adaptation to the environment" or in related terms. Yet, it is not clear that "general intelligence" or g, traditionally conceptualized in terms of a general factor in a psychometrically-based hierarchical model of intelligence, provides an optimal way of defining intelligence as adaptation to the environment. Such a definition of adaptive intelligence would need to be biologically based in terms of evolutionary theory, would need to take into account the cultural context of adaptation, and would need to take into account whether thought and behavior labeled as "adaptively intelligent" actually contributed to the perpetuation of the human and other species, or whether it was indifferent or actually destructive to this perpetuation. In this article, I consider the similarities and differences between "general intelligence" and "adaptive intelligence," as well as the implications especially of the differences.

We conducted two studies to replicate and extend, as well as test, the limits of previous findings regarding an apparent disconnect between scientific-reasoning skills in psychological science, on the one hand, and scores on standardized tests of general intelligence, on the other. In Study 1, we examined whether this disconnect would extend beyond psychological science to additional sciences as well, such as nutrition and agriculture. The results did indeed extend, suggesting that scientific reasoning across various natural sciences is comparable to scientific reasoning in psychological science, but different in kind from the reasoning required on conventional standardized tests. In Study 2, we examined whether these findings were linked to the format of presentation of scientific problems. Whereas real scientific-reasoning problems are open-ended, standardized tests tend to use multiple-choice format. We discovered that using multiple-choice format did indeed result in an apparently closer relation of the scientific-reasoning tests to two of the conventional ability measures (SAT Reading and Number Series) but not to two other tests (Letter Sets and SAT Math). Thus, one can increase the correlations of scientific-reasoning tests with at least some standardized ability tests but at the cost of content validity and ecological validity.

This article presents an 8P theoretical framework for understanding creativity and theories of creativity. The 8Ps are purpose, press, person, problem, process, product, propulsion, and public. The article opens by distinguishing between a theory and a model, on the one hand, and a theoretical framework, on the other. It then considers briefly some of the theoretical frameworks for creativity that have been proposed in the past. Next, it describes the 8P theoretical framework and how it applies to understanding creativity and theories of creativity. The 8P framework suggests that most theories of creativity have been rather incomplete, dealing only with limited aspects of the phenomenon.

Courage may be the most important gift of all. It is not something we are born with. It is not something that, for the most part, we learn in school. Rather, it is a choice that anyone can make--if they are willing to pay the price. This article discusses the gift of courage. It discusses what courage is, why it is important, and why it crucially needs to be incorporated into contemporary discourse about giftedness. It is courage, perhaps more than any other form of giftedness, that will determine what this world becomes--or does not become.

In this article, we present a hierarchical model for teaching scientific thinking to gifted students. This article follows up on an article published 40 years ago in this journal. The problem now, as 40 years ago, is that gifted students often are taught science courses at a more intensive level, but without their truly learning how to think scientifically. We argue that students of science need not only learn the content of science courses, but also learn, at a deep level, how to think scientifically. Our model addresses the issue of what this deep level consists of. Level I involves Teaching Scientific Knowledge. Level II involves Teaching Scientific Problem Solving. Level III involves the deepest level of scientific thinking: Teaching Scientific Problem Finding. We end the article with conclusions about these issues.

The field of giftedness legitimates itself on the basis of correlations of gifted-identification measures with future success that do not mean what they often are taken to mean. When one views the inadequacies of these correlations, the field turns out to be much like the emperor who had no clothes. This essay reviews some of the assumptions upon which the legitimacy of much of the field, at least in practice, bases itself, and concludes that because many assumptions are inadequate, so are certain widespread practices of the field. In particular, the fact that measures used in gifted identification predict future success, as measured by conventional societally sanctioned indices of success, does not suggest that those measures actually are complete or even adequate for gifted identification. Society needs new directions for theory, research, and practice.

Giftedness is usually conceived of in trait-like terms. But it often is expressed in the world in state-like terms--in response to challenging but often unpredictable situations where it is unclear who will rise to the challenges or even how we could know in advance who would be able to address the challenges at hand. Whereas traits tend to be stable, long term, and somewhat predictable in their manifestations, states tend to be unstable, often short term, and frequently unpredictable in the ways they manifest themselves. This article introduces the concept of state-giftedness. Because state-giftedness is not easily identifiable, everyone needs to be taught how to respond to the unexpected and unpredictable situations that will be consequential for their and others' lives. Because of the unpredictability, these will be situations for which a ready repertoire of responses is neither available nor easily constructed.

In this article, I describe the ACCEL (active concerned citizenship and ethical leadership) model for university education. I then apply it to the teaching of psychology. The goal of the model is to develop university students who are active concerned citizens and ethical leaders, where leaders are viewed as people who make a positive, meaningful, and potentially enduring difference to the world at some level. I discuss the role education can play in developing the elements of ACCEL--creative, analytical, practical, and wise thinking--and I give examples from my own classrooms teaching various aspects of psychology and human development.

Although academics are accustomed to writing articles and books, they much less frequently write textbooks. When they do, they likely find it much harder to do well than they ever would have imagined. This difficulty is likely to surprise them, because they have considerable experience in writing research articles and in teaching. I argue in this article that the reason that textbook writing is so hard for academics is that there is substantial negative transfer from professional academic writing to textbook writing. That is, experience in academic writing often interferes with textbook writing. Moreover, there are a number of factors that make textbook writing simply hard to do. I enumerate the reasons why this is the case.

This article considers the problem of developing creativity, with a focus on psychological science. What makes a psychological or other scientist creative, and what are the attitudes as well as skills that one must develop to become creative? What can educators do to enhance their creativity for the benefit of science and the world? The essay focuses on transformational creativity—creativity that makes the world a better place. Transformational creativity requires individuals to defy popular beliefs (the crowd) and assumptions (the Zeitgeist) and often, their own past beliefs (the self). The essay also provides tips for improving creativity that draw on the experience of 100 highly eminent psychologists who were identified in a survey by Edward Diener and his associates. These creators were transformational in their own field of psychology. Mentors and teachers, in general, should put more focus on developing transformationally creative attitudes in their work with young people, because those are the attitudes that will make the field better and make the world a better place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]